I sent the following email to UAF’s chancellor today, without much hope for making a difference but I felt it necessary nonetheless. To add to its impact I copied our campus newspaper as well, though in hindsight wished I had copied the Fairbanks News-Miner too.

Chancellor,

I just witnessed a remarkable sight on campus. A UAF trash compacting truck is presently backed up to Gruening, and a handfull of UAF workers are loading perfectly good desks into it (the kind where the chair is attached to the desk), one by one. As they are crushed more and more are added. I witnessed at least 20 be destroyed in as many mintues. I wondered, what offense could these desks have committed that they aren’t being reused here, or donated elsewhere, but will instead end up as tangles of metal and particleboard in a landfill? Curious, I checked one out - indeed it was in perfect condition!

It seems to me that universities need to be the institutions that set an example for the rest of our society, if real change is going to happen that averts ecological catastrophe and allows us, as a species, to inhabit this beautiful planet for a while longer. The display outside of Gruening is not an example of this new thinking, but of the thinking of old minds - “Out of sight, out of mind.”

New minds would approach the question of what to do with those apparenly unneeded desks very differently. It makes me sad that those in power at this university apparently continue to think with old minds rather than new ones.

Daniel Quinn wrote “Either the people of our species will learn how to live sustainably on this planet or they will not.” Period, nothing more needs to be said. Its easy to avoid the fact that this is a life or death scenario, but its impossible to afford. Sometimes, there are signs of change that make me feel hopeful of our chances; but today, after seeing the blindness to the problems that our institution is capable of, I’m not.

There’s a lesson we need to learn here and a discussion we need to have, as a community. Other universities have already started that dialogue, why not us?

“We have it within our deepest powers not only to change ourselves but to change our culture. If man is to remain on earth he must transform the five-millenia-long urbanizing civilization tradition into a new ecologically sensitive harmony-oriented wild-minded scientific-spiritual culture. “ -Gary Snyder, from Four Changes

Or, as Daniel Quinn put it, our future rests not in new plans from old minds, but from new minds with new ideas.

Long-term social and ecological sustainability is only possible when the people of that society are able to manage change: to innovate, think outside of their cultural or traditional ‘boxes’ and to find, in the face of adversity and surprise, vision enough to walk away from those things in their lives that are not working to transform themselves into something new — perhaps something healthier, more adaptive, resilient, efficient, more ecologically concomitant, or in a word, something more ‘elegant.’

Of the many contemporary challenges faced by our species, those with the most significant and troubling long-term implications are therefore not the ones outside the immediate reach of human innovation and adaptation such as the downscale impacts of global climatic and ecological change, but those of people who think with ‘old minds’: the hubris of politicians, the greed of capitalists, and the ignorance of everyman. I saw all of these in the desk-killing display today on campus.

I imagine that in the grand scheme of things I’m no more or less ignorant than the next guy, mind you. I don’t perceive this website as some messianic soap-box from which I might enlighten a sleeping world. For that matter, none of my ideas are particularly original - though they seem so when you hold them up against the things like this that happen every day.

I’m just saying, the writing is on the wall, people. What’s the fucking hold up?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Rhetoric, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.